* Sebastian Spaeth, responsible for testing images of SHR is '''calling for final [http://www.shr-project.org/trac bug reports]''' before making a SHR-Stable images! It looks like recent SHR-Testing images has reached stability level, which allows to make a '''snapshot of SHR-Stable!''' Although for this to be done, your help is needed, as there might still be some bugs hidden that need to be discovered. Do not hesitate, even one bug filed by you will greatly help to improve SHR-Stable!

+

* Sebastian Spaeth, responsible for testing images of SHR is '''calling for final [http://www.shr-project.org/trac bug reports]''' before making a SHR-Stable image! It looks like recent SHR-Testing images have reached a stability level, which allows to make a '''snapshot of SHR-Stable!''' Although for this to be done, your help is needed, as there might still be some bugs hidden that need to be discovered. Do not hesitate, even one bug filed by you will greatly help to improve SHR-Stable!

* Harald Welte is '''[http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/01/07/#20100107-gsm_devel_board-planning planning]''' to create a GSM development board based on 100% open hardware design and 100% free software. The initial focus is to create a board that behaves like a GSM cellphone. This could be interesting for the gta02-core project.

* Harald Welte is '''[http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/01/07/#20100107-gsm_devel_board-planning planning]''' to create a GSM development board based on 100% open hardware design and 100% free software. The initial focus is to create a board that behaves like a GSM cellphone. This could be interesting for the gta02-core project.

Latest revision as of 13:15, 1 February 2010

Contents

Since begin of year 2010 a lot has happened, both in application and distribution ground. But not everyone remembers, that all this progress would not be possible without middleware software layer. Following this thought we would like to remind FreeRunner's community about, often underestimated, FSO framework. Michael 'Mickey' Lauer, FSO's Framework lead stated, that 2009 was a turbulent year for FSO's team and thanked to all contributors and users of FSO APIs.

Concerning general problem of "invisibility", which affects all middleware, together with Sebastian Spaeth post and this one, which states that currently only one guy ('Mickey') is working, unpaid, on FSO development, we would like to call Community for help. Both, developers men-power and financial contributions are needed to keep up great progress of FSO Framework. Keep in mind, that this progress will affect all distributions and applications which use FSO Framework. Thus, if you have few spare coins on your PayPal account, and willing to donate to FSO project: coreteam@freesmartphone.org , or particular FSO contributors, go for it!

Radek Polak have just finished porting of Miklos Szeredi's spectemu - A Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulator for Linux/UNIX, to Qt on Freerunner. It's now in QtMoko package feed if you want to try it or you can compile from sources for your favourite distro. The main work was port to Qt, possibility to use touchscreen and creating GUI for loading/saving snapshots and creating mouse/touchscreen bindings. For QtMoko you will need v17 kernel to get decent speed. Emulator can now do following:

Podboy is a podcast aggregator/player written in Python/Elementary. Its interface aims to be easy and finger friendly. It uses Feedparser Python module for download/parsing of podcast feeds, Gstreamer for playing of episodes and SQLite for storing data. Changes since version 1.0.0:

New feature: possibility to show details of episodes before to play them via a new entry "Show Details" in the menu "Actions" of pages "Episodes" and "Downloads".

New feature: update only the selected podcast in page "Downloads".

New feature: episodes can now be tagged as "Ignore" in page "Downloads". All episodes with status "ignore" will be skip when the downloading of all episodes of a podcast will be requested.

New feature: unplayed episodes can now be identified by a yellow star. Unplayed/played status of episodes can be manually toggled via a new entry "Toggle Played Status" in the menu "Actions" of page "Episodes".

New feature: import of podcasts via an OPML file (new button "Import" in the page "Podcasts")

Literki is a full qwerty keyboard with configurable layout, always transparent, therefore applications don't need to redraw screens and popup is therefore very fast. With literki comes the touchpad. With it use can use the bottom of the touchscreen to move a cursor around. You can then use left and right click with it. There are also four scroll buttons, which are useful if your application has very small scroll bars. Changes from previous version are:

Sebastian Spaeth, responsible for testing images of SHR is calling for final bug reports before making a SHR-Stable image! It looks like recent SHR-Testing images have reached a stability level, which allows to make a snapshot of SHR-Stable! Although for this to be done, your help is needed, as there might still be some bugs hidden that need to be discovered. Do not hesitate, even one bug filed by you will greatly help to improve SHR-Stable!

Harald Welte is planning to create a GSM development board based on 100% open hardware design and 100% free software. The initial focus is to create a board that behaves like a GSM cellphone. This could be interesting for the gta02-core project.

Werner Almesberger posted another component update note. It states that there are plenty of mechanical parts left but electrical parts are more of a problem. There seem to be some inconsistencies in the inventory, so some positions may still change. If you are able to provide project with with missing parts, take a look at full inventory list and consult with Werner.

SHR is a community driven distribution and according to latest poll, is the most popular OS for the Freerunner. Although it has not made a stable release yet, it is actively developed. According to this thread, recently a substantial FSO upgrade (mentioned in Introduction) is hitting SHR. Thanks to reimplementation of FSO middleware API's in Vala, you can expect significant speed improvements. Specifically, SHR-Unstable now features fsodeviced, fsousaged and fsonetworkd, and introduces a more elegant separation of configuration files for each daemon. Images are now available for UBIFS, in addition to jffs and ext. The discussions about faster kernels is also affecting SHR among other distributions. MTD_NAND_VERIFY_WRITE kernel option, which should speed it up, is already pushed in. Experimental kernels (2.6.29-rc3-drm, 2.6.31, 2.6.32) are available for testing.

Gennady Kupava has been working on optimizing the speed of kernel and measuring the result. This has caused a great noise on the kernel list and irc. It seems that even after that many months of work on the kernel, one can still discover new ways of catching big chunks of speed improvements here and there. Some interesting results here.

Views

Personal tools

Period 2010-01-01 to 2010-01-14

Introduction

Since begin of year 2010 a lot has happened, both in application and distribution ground. But not everyone remembers, that all this progress would not be possible without middleware software layer. Following this thought we would like to remind FreeRunner's community about, often underestimated, FSO framework. Michael 'Mickey' Lauer, FSO's Framework lead stated, that 2009 was a turbulent year for FSO's team and thanked to all contributors and users of FSO APIs.

Concerning general problem of "invisibility", which affects all middleware, together with Sebastian Spaeth post and this one, which states that currently only one guy ('Mickey') is working, unpaid, on FSO development, we would like to call Community for help. Both, developers men-power and financial contributions are needed to keep up great progress of FSO Framework. Keep in mind, that this progress will affect all distributions and applications which use FSO Framework. Thus, if you have few spare coins on your PayPal account, and willing to donate to FSO project: coreteam@freesmartphone.org , or particular FSO contributors, go for it!

Applications

New Applications

Elm-Browser 1.0_r0.4

This is an initial release of a very fast, finger friendly webkit-efl / elementary based browser.

Radek Polak have just finished porting of Miklos Szeredi's spectemu - A Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulator for Linux/UNIX, to Qt on Freerunner. It's now in QtMoko package feed if you want to try it or you can compile from sources for your favourite distro. The main work was port to Qt, possibility to use touchscreen and creating GUI for loading/saving snapshots and creating mouse/touchscreen bindings. For QtMoko you will need v17 kernel to get decent speed. Emulator can now do following:

Podboy is a podcast aggregator/player written in Python/Elementary. Its interface aims to be easy and finger friendly. It uses Feedparser Python module for download/parsing of podcast feeds, Gstreamer for playing of episodes and SQLite for storing data. Changes since version 1.0.0:

New feature: possibility to show details of episodes before to play them via a new entry "Show Details" in the menu "Actions" of pages "Episodes" and "Downloads".

New feature: update only the selected podcast in page "Downloads".

New feature: episodes can now be tagged as "Ignore" in page "Downloads". All episodes with status "ignore" will be skip when the downloading of all episodes of a podcast will be requested.

New feature: unplayed episodes can now be identified by a yellow star. Unplayed/played status of episodes can be manually toggled via a new entry "Toggle Played Status" in the menu "Actions" of page "Episodes".

New feature: import of podcasts via an OPML file (new button "Import" in the page "Podcasts")

Literki is a full qwerty keyboard with configurable layout, always transparent, therefore applications don't need to redraw screens and popup is therefore very fast. With literki comes the touchpad. With it use can use the bottom of the touchscreen to move a cursor around. You can then use left and right click with it. There are also four scroll buttons, which are useful if your application has very small scroll bars. Changes from previous version are:

Community

Sebastian Spaeth, responsible for testing images of SHR is calling for final bug reports before making a SHR-Stable images! It looks like recent SHR-Testing images has reached stability level, which allows to make a snapshot of SHR-Stable! Although for this to be done, your help is needed, as there might still be some bugs hidden that need to be discovered. Do not hesitate, even one bug filed by you will greatly help to improve SHR-Stable!

Harald Welte is planning to create a GSM development board based on 100% open hardware design and 100% free software. The initial focus is to create a board that behaves like a GSM cellphone. This could be interesting for the gta02-core project.

Werner Almesberger posted another component update note. It states that there are plenty of mechanical parts left but electrical parts are more of a problem. There seem to be some inconsistencies in the inventory, so some positions may still change. If you are able to provide project with with missing parts, take a look at full inventory list and consult with Werner.

SHR is a community driven distribution and according to latest poll, is the most popular OS for the Freerunner. Although it has not made a stable release yet, it is actively developed. According to this thread, recently a substantial FSO upgrade (mentioned in Introduction) is hitting SHR. Thanks to reimplementation of FSO middleware API's in Vala, you can expect significant speed improvements. Specifically, SHR-Unstable now features fsodeviced, fsousaged and fsonetworkd, and introduces a more elegant separation of configuration files for each daemon. Images are now available for UBIFS, in addition to jffs and ext. The discussions about faster kernels is also affecting SHR among other distributions. MTD_NAND_VERIFY_WRITE kernel option, which should speed it up, is already pushed in. Experimental kernels (2.6.29-rc3-drm, 2.6.31, 2.6.32) are available for testing.

Gennady Kupava has been working on optimizing the speed of kernel and measuring the result. This has caused a great noise on the kernel list and irc. It seems that even after that many months of work on the kernel, one can still discover new ways of catching big chunks of speed improvements here and there. Some interesting results here.